Out of silence: poems from the camp

Sibyl Ruth never knew that her great-aunt - Tante Rose - had been in a concentration camp, or that she had written poetry while she was there. Now, with her mother, she is translating Rose's poems and learning about her survival and legacy

My mother is 80. If I don't ask now it may be too late. So my mouth opens and the words jump out. "Mama, can you help me translate Tante Rose's poems?"

For the first time in decades I am asking my mother for something. Something important. My mouth feels dry. My heart's banging away. I'm not sure how I'll deal with my disappointment if she says no.

Although Tante Rose died in 1985, the manuscript that contains more than 40 of her poems has only just come to light. It got sent to my mother, but I am not sure she wants to share it. I'm not certain what the poems are about, but I do know they were written from a place called Theresienstadt. Which is enough to make me think my mother may not even want to look at them. Perhaps the poems will get shoved in a box all over again. A piece of the family past that can't quite be got rid of. But one that is too distressing to be held up to the light.

At the same time, my mother is the one who should help me. After all, didn't she used to work as a translator? I would come back from school and find the small table covered with huge purple dictionaries. She has the skills, the knowledge, the experience. After years of being independent, I need her again.

My mother looks even more anxious than usual. The creases in her forehead deepen. Her mouth sets in an obstinate line. She says, "I'm not sure I can do it."

"Just put the pieces into plain English," I plead. "I'll do the rest."

My mother was born in Berlin in 1926, and lived there until she was nearly 11. Because both her parents were busy doctors, every summer she'd be sent from their flat in the city to stay with Tante Rose. Rose Scooler was the eldest daughter of a successful lawyer. As a young woman she'd gone to finishing school in Switzerland and then married a businessman. He had built her a big house in the country in Saxony. All the stories my mother loved to tell about her childhood involved this big house, its gardens, her freedom to roam around the village. For her, this was a place where the sun always shone. Perhaps the only coolness came from Tante Rose herself. According to my mother, she was a rather dignified, formal woman who expected to be greeted with a curtsy, not a hug.

I need my mother's help because I can't speak German. Although my mother never lost fluency in her native tongue, I wasn't brought up bilingual. Back in the ignorant 1960s, there was a theory that bringing up children to speak more than one language confused them. Also, the end of the second world war was less than a couple of decades away. Perhaps in suburban Cheshire bringing up children to sound conspicuously "alien" may not have seemed wise. Or maybe my mother wanted a secret, private language, so she could talk to her relations without me understanding anything ...

Not that she had many relations to talk to. Tante Rose had gone to live in the States, though not until after my mother came to England. We never visited, because crossing the Atlantic on planes was something that only rich or famous people did. Even phone calls were too expensive.

"I'd really like to turn Tante Rose's poems into English ones," I tell my mother. "I think other people might want to read them."

I have published a couple of books of poetry, but suspect my mother doesn't think much of them. The poems don't rhyme. They contain edgy, autobiographical writing about messy families and failed relationships. My mother's literary preferences are for "nice" stories with happy endings. I did give her a copy of my first collection. Later I found it stuffed into the bottom shelf of the bookcase, in an unused bedroom.

My mother sighs and says, "I suppose I could try. But I can't promise you."

After Tante Rose died at the grand age of 103, my mother told me the news in a letter. With it she enclosed a copy of a piece about Christmas that my great-aunt had written in English. The article describes a wartime family celebration in a Berlin apartment. The bathroom walls have come down, and in other rooms the windows have been broken. Although they've had to pin up blankets to replace the glass, there are no air raids that day and at least the family can eat together. She refers to this party as "the last ... for many years, for soon after the police came to take me to a concentration camp". The place they took her to was Theresienstadt.

After getting this letter I said to my mother, "I didn't know that Tante Rose was in a camp."

A trapped expression spread over her face. For a moment she was silent. Then she said, "Theresienstadt wasn't one of the worst places." And turned away.

As well as having been a translator, my mother worked as a librarian. Her role as keeper of the family history is not without difficulties, but she understands the importance of archives, and of access to documents. Also, she now lives in a block of retirement flats where some residents are losing their mental faculties. More than anything my mother wishes to keep her own mind sharp and active.

Perhaps it's for these reasons that over the past few months, Tante Rose's poems - and my mother's versions of them - have been dropping through my door once or twice a week.

Having extracted what I'd wanted from my mother, I began getting cold feet. I had no idea what to expect from the poems. Of course I knew about the unimaginable numbers of the dead. Of course I had seen horrific film material about the Holocaust. Against this, I had my mother's statement that Theresienstadt was not "the worst". And my great-aunt had survived, hadn't she?

Tante Rose's poems are typed on paper that's turned yellow. This makes them appear old and fragile. Yet there's a determined look about them, as if each letter has been made by hitting a key with conviction. Soon I develop the habit of using my mother's translations to get the overall meaning. Then I pore over the original German with my own dictionary, developing increasingly clear images of the place from which my great-aunt wrote.

For hours at a time I forget that I live in Birmingham in 2007. I can almost believe I'm back in the final years of the second world war, in a ghetto north of Prague. Where I am trying my very hardest to take in what Rose Scooler, a woman in her early 60s, is telling me.

This woman has come a long way from being the "lady of the house". She may have been dignified once, but now she has to live alongside many others in conditions where dignity is impossible. At one point there are 50 of them sleeping on one floor. Even when dormitories have been sorted out, there are plenty of tribulations. Neighbours who snore or smell. Mattresses that are infested with bedbugs.

But although the enforced proximity of others is hard, it's obvious that my aunt has forged close bonds with other women there. Food is all-important to Tante Rose and her companions. They are always hungry:

Each day we ransacked the shelter, looking again

and again for cabbage leaves, peelings, scraps.

We counted ourselves lucky to find any of that.

And the women are desperately cold. With her friend, Frau L, my great-aunt goes off at night to raid coal from the heap at the railway sidings. They return to their sleeping quarters with "hard-won treasure ... gorgeous loot". Tante Rose makes the expedition sound almost like fun, some jolly schoolgirl jape. However, had she and her friend been caught, their likely punishment would have been a spell in Theresienstadt's prison, and then being sent to another camp - such as Auschwitz.

Appalling though the physical conditions were, perhaps an even greater hardship was not knowing where relatives might be. One poem alludes to those few women who had any scrap of information as to the whereabouts of their husbands and children as "the lucky ones".

For a time, the situation of some inmates is a little better. A commission from the Red Cross is due to inspect, and an appearance of human decency must be simulated. But to deal with overcrowding in the camp, large numbers of Theresienstadt's inhabitants are transported. Those who remain have to labour day after day, cleaning the place up. They're given more food, but Tante Rose is understandably cynical:

They really are force-feeding us. It is obvious what's under way. Before long we'll all be fat as butter, thanks to the Commission. Hip hooray!

Once the commission has gone, the woman whose husband had owned a factory returns to being a slave- labourer. She has to split mica. The work is monotonous, and production targets are constantly being raised. Tante Rose makes up a few satirical pieces, making fun of her bosses and supervisors. Other poems are about exhaustion, not knowing how much longer it's possible to go on.

In the early 21st century, some of our most treasured relationships can be virtual ones. We may feel close to people without ever having met them. Having translated around half of Rose Scooler's Theresienstadt poems, I now feel extraordinarily connected with my great-aunt. I admire her resilience, her grim humour in the face of horror, the way her verses are as finely honed as the blade she used for mica-splitting. I marvel at how well a woman who had once led a comfortable, privileged life managed to deal with extreme deprivation.

I realise too that Tante Rose survived, not as a result of the talents and qualities she possessed, but through sheer luck. Inheriting a robust constitution helped her not to succumb to the fatal diseases that were rife in the camp. Being selected for mica-splitting also saved her. The mica was needed for military purposes. Those who did this work were not sent on transports elsewhere.

Relationships with the living have changed too. My mother has turned out to be one of the most reliable and conscientious co-workers I've ever had. We email each other about the finer points of translation. We discuss our interpretations on the phone. I revel in the occasional words of praise that escape from her lips. And I'm glad, at long last, to be developing some understanding of my mother tongue.

While I sit writing this piece, it's likely she's preparing another translation. I think of her with her dictionaries, checking up on some obscure colloquial phrase. A lot of the residents in her block of retirement flats do little more than distract themselves with daytime TV. Yet my mother has resolved to confront the pain of the past: she is striving to make sense of it.

I used to feel that I was descended from victims, that the Holocaust had cast its shadow even on to my generation. But now I can walk in the light, knowing that I come from a line of strong women.

Holocaust Memorial Day is on January 27, next Sunday

Poems from Theresienstadt

Glimmers

About missing her son

I want to wake in the morning, hear again the sound of an alarm half-muffled through the wall. Its murmuring, 'Get up. You must get up.' Then, minutes later, the front door closes in the hall. I want to run my hand across that pillow where your head lay dreaming in the dark. Before I busy myself, tidying the little flat so it'll be our haven when you return from work.

I want the joy of sharing supper again. To sit in comfort at our table while you say the meal that I've made is very tasty. You serve up news of what you've done that day. And I want us both to listen as the wireless turns this humble room into a giant stage. To catch the fragrance when you smoke your pipe or, as you read, the whisper of a turning page.

I want to be beside you in the car again as we roar downhill, then zoom up to the clouds seeing a magical world waltz past us. I want these things. I want them here and now. Suddenly I'm jolted from my fantasies. Back in the workshop. Loads of mica to split and a harsh voice in my ear, 'Your crate's almost empty. That's not much good, is it?'

Even So

Even So is a poem Rose wrote at the very end of her time in the camp.

There were fifty of us sleeping on one floor during the hardest time I'd ever known. For many of those long nights I stayed awake from hunger. And being chilled to the bone. I had lessons in the way that cruelty may consist of being left to rot. Even so. Would I prefer never to have seen inside Theresienstadt? I would not.

I was an attendant, running about in heat and frost, every kind of weather, up and down the different flights of steps. Often I felt my feet could go no further. They had me splitting mica next: sheet after sheet till I almost dropped. Even so. Would I prefer never to have seen inside Theresienstadt? I would not.

Here I've met a host of men and women who, living through a season of emergency, lost what made them more than animal - their basic human decency. Yet I found others who'd persevere in acts of saving grace. No matter what. So, while you might prefer never to have seen inside Theresienstadt, I would not.